PM announces financial aid for Noida farmers

New Delhi: The Prime Minister on Sunday announced financial aid of Rs 50,000 for those seriously injured and Rs 10000 for those with minor injuries, for farmers and their family members injured during the recent incidents at Bhatta Parsaul and Acheypur village areas in District Gautam Buddha Nagar.

On Sunday Sachin Pilot visited Dasna Jail to meet the farmers. He said that the incident needs to be probed. "The NCW report and reports by several other agencies indicate that there have been several issues that need to be addressed. More than the atrocities it is the land grabbing by the state government that needs to be addressed. The state government has made a real estate business out of all this and not just these two, other villages may have had to suffer," he said.

Rahul Gandhi had on May 16 met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a group of villagers from Bhatta and Parsaul. He complained to Singh about the alleged "repression" and "murder" of farmers in the Mayawati-ruled state.

Emerging from a half-an-hour meeting, Rahul alleged huge heaps of ash carrying burnt bodies have been found in the villages where farmers were agitating for better compensation for their land acquired by Mayawati government.

He also showed the Prime Minister pictures purportedly of bodies burnt and other forms of violence against farmers and their family members.

"The issue here is a more fundamental one with regard to these villages in particular and a large number of villages in UP all down the Agra highway, where state repression is being used, where people are being murdered. Quite severe atrocities taking place there. There is a set of large 74 heaps of ash there with dead bodies inside. Everybody in the village knows it. We can give you pictures. Women have been raped, people have been thrashed. Houses have been destroyed," he alleged.

However, the Mayawati government hit out at Rahul, claiming that all allegations levelled by him were false. The Uttar Pradesh government released a forensic report which stated that there were no human remains in the ashes found in the twin villages.